This charts are averaged over 24 hours. After finding a block we have spikes of about 300 GHash/s. This is not a problem for the pool, but members opted for PPLNS in order to avoid pool hopping. It is implemented and will be activated within the next weeks.

IMHO this started with BTC prices falling to $3. I can understand that most miners need to increase their income. But for the loyal pool members this is a problem

This charts are averaged over 24 hours. After finding a block we have spikes of about 300 GHash/s. This is not a problem for the pool, but members opted for PPLNS in order to avoid pool hopping. It is implemented and will be activated within the next weeks.

IMHO this started with BTC prices falling to $3. I can understand that most miners need to increase their income. But for the loyal pool members this is a problem

Regular pool hopping started about a year ago, but didn't become popular until the short-lived 'Multipool' pool and then really took off with bitHopper and Cherrypicker hopperware. I think the reduction in the number of proportional payout pools is responsible for increased poolhopping activity on the remaining proportional pools more so than the drop in btc price.

Maybe the drop in btc price means that poolhoppers can stay mining when it would be unprofitable for regular GPU miners, which will mean even more hoppers compared to regular miners. But I don't see many people resorting to hopping because of the price drop. (waiting for a bunch of miners now to comment that I'm wrong and that's exactly what they did ).

@deepceleron, did you get those graphs from the pool or a website that monitors pools? There was mPerth's stats which was a great resource, but it's been down a while now.

Yeah regular miners are getting robbed blind. The larger the difference in hop hashing power vs long round hashing power the more revenue is siphoned off. That charts shows peak hop is over double normal pool hashing power. Brutal.

Proportional pools still exist because the regular miners who are getting robbed blind want them.

I guess in most cases they are not well informed. Proportional is very easy to understand while other PPLNS or even the geometric methods are not as easy to understand. I have to admit that before some of my miners demanded to choose another reward system I was fine with proportional too. Only after I wrapped my head around PPLNS and pool hopping I saw its benefits. However I needed to explain it to some of the pool members in order to convince them (http://blog.masterpool.eu/2011/11/pplns-facts-and-myths/). The other problem is that there is no benefit for pool operators to implement another reward system as long as the pool members are fine with its policy. It means more work, more testing, perhaps new errors. Thus pool operators will only move if miners put them under pressure by moving to non proportional pools. Fortunately I have some very insistent pool members which made me consider PPLNS

Perhaps we need something in between Menis technical abstracts and my very simplified blog post on the forum and on the Wiki. At the moment even if you heard about PPLNS or geometrical you are not able to find easy to understand information which are suitable for the occasional miner.